Category: people

So we’re done building Furillen City. For now. And as this great picture from Wurfi shows, it looks pretty good.

But of course, we never really finish. Just today, we added the art studio behind Cat Mews, filling in the last (lateral) ‘dead spot’ on the main sim platform at 3400 metres. We’ll surely add more, and tinker with what we have. But for now, that’s enough … and we hope you enjoy visiting this place as much we enjoyed building it.

Having spent most of the spare time I had during three rather intense weeks putting the city together, I must admit to feeling some trepidation when we opened two nights ago. This was mainly trepidation at suddenly having to share the space! But in fact, seeing people beginning to occupy the city, visiting some of my own favourite spots, and just hanging out on the streets – sitting and watching – brought genuine pleasure as everything started coming to life. Long may this continue.

So … what now?

Well … in the City itself, we’ll be taking advantage of the higher avatar limit by holding music events (including live events) and exhibitions at the various venues we’ve created. We have identified where the exhibition space will be, and there are at least four spaces where music events can – and will – be held. This starts on Tuesday, when there will be a batman-themed party – what else? – in one of the sewer rooms. So get out your costumes and avatars and come along. And actually, any superhero or comic book character will do – just bring whatever you have.

And watch this space for news of more events.

Meanwhile, having barely visited the ground at the sim for the past three weeks, we dropped down today and installed an old favourite from La Digue du Braek, Maison du pendu loon-plage, which I wrote about here. It means losing the ferry for a while, but nothing stands completely still … even at Furillen.

Furillen moved into a new region this week, so if you haven’t done so already, reset your landmarks to here. The move was simply a question of giving ourselves more scope to expand, with more prims to exploit (20,000, rather than 5,000), and for events, a higher avatar limit (100, rather than 20). Having ‘relaunched’ Furillen in early January with a major new layout including the hotel, fishing huts and pergola on the hill, I resisted the temptation to make further changes now. So the sim was simply replicated, and for a few days I had a the slightly bizarre experience of teleporting between two sims that were exactly the same … so much so that at once stage I began putting things back at the old sim, mistaking it for the new one.

There are, of course, some very small changes, but you’d need to have quite an eye for detail to spot them. No doubt somebody will!

So … what next?

The first priority is to close La Digue du Braek. I won’t be writing sad epitaphs for the sim, and we won’t be holding a ‘goodbye Digue’ party, as SLers are sometimes wont to do. Digue started quietly and it will end quietly (and we’ll be stealing bits of it for Furillen). The Flickr pool speaks for itself : well over a thousand pictures from 241 members in less than three months.

I always wondered about how the two sims would interact, and it was fascinating to watch. For a while we thought that Digue was going to overtake Furillen and it would be the latter that we’d have to close … but Furillen has an incredibly dedicated following, and for whatever reason the sim appears to draw in a steady stream of visitors who stay at the sim for long periods of time, day in day out. So when it came to deciding which sim to let go while we ‘re-allocate’ resources, it was a no brainer.

Furillen has changed a lot during the seventeen months of its life. It appeared quietly, with no big announcements, and grew partly because of the incredibly strong Flickr group – great photography is still a major feature of the sim, and the flow of pictures has never dried up. Then there have been popular (and, in their scale, quite unusual) events – weekends devoted to Bowie, Radiohead, and Pink Floyd when the entire sim was transformed, and the recent Star Wars rebuilds we staged over the winter vacation.

An important truth about these events was that I like building and designing sims best of all, so any excuse to rip things up and rebuild is welcome. I don’t see the point of having a sim and just letting it stand, unchanged …

There were photo competitions, parties, and a bar – all great fun, but they involved more work than I can realistically do given my real life commitments. So, more recently, Furillen has settled into just being itself, and I must say that I like it best this way.

Having said this, we all like to tinker and the sim will doubtless see more changes in the coming months, and – quite possibly – more events. We will see …

So once the last rites have been read and Digue has been closed, we’ll be messing about in the sky above Furillen and coming up with something that will enhance the sim as an interesting space to hang around, explore and enjoy art, culture and the company of others.

And if it sounds as though I haven’t much of a clue about exactly what we’re doing up there, you’d be absolutely right …

I am shocked and saddened indeed to learn that Amona Savira has died. She was a wonderful photographer who took some of the finest and most original images of this sim, which I post here as a tribute. I knew her only through these pictures, and the generous comments she always made on the work of others. May she rest in peace.

While Furillen seems busier than ever lately, La Digue du Braek has been going through a quiet spell. It’s an interesting Second Life dynamic, though. These sims often have a similar daily visitor count, but while Furillen seems constantly busy, often with between 10 and 15 avatars there at any one time, you’ll usually find Digue with only a handful of visitors.

People come to Furillen and hang around, sometimes for hours. Why? My guess is that it’s simply because they see other people there. They land at Digue, and often move on because … they see few other people there. As ever in Second Life, numbers attract numbers, and even though we ostensibly come to places like Furillen and Digue simply to stand around on our own, even ‘AFK’, we seem to prefer it when others are also standing around – alone – in the same place.

I talked about this over a year ago. I have no idea whether I’m right or wrong, it’s just an impression.

All of which is a fairly irrelevant way of saying that those who do dwell at Digue take nice pictures, and there have been some great images posted in the group, which has reached nearly 1100 posts from 232 members. Here are my own personal favourites from the past week or so …

In exactly one week, Furillen’s new Bar Cafe Fabriken will open its doors, with a music event on Saturday evening, European time. I’ll be announcing details of this during the week. Here is some history.

Bar Cafe Fabriken
Backstory – Fact or Fiction?

by Micky Siamendes

A quick Furillen recap to start with: The island gained importance in the beginning of the 20th century, when a German company established a limestone industry there. In the 1970s the industry closed down and the Swedish military took over the island, turning it into an area off limits to the public. Radar stations were placed on the island back then and decommissioned again in the late 1990s. But the Swedish military is still operating smaller installations on Furillen with a reduced number of troops.

Being away from family and friends the remaining troops stationed on Furillen had a hard time to fight boredom on the rather dull and deserted island. To prevent them from depression and cabin fever, the Swedish Department of Defense decided to convert one of the abandonned buildings which had formerly been used by the encryption department (the troops themselves had called it the “Swedish Bletchley Park bunker”) into some sort of event location.

That is when Bar Cafe Fabriken was born. The plan was to provide entertainment on one hand, thinking along the lines of Marilyn Monroe visiting the troops in South Korea to cheer them up, artists and entertainers were to be invited over to Furillen on a regular basis.

The second approach of Bar Cafe Fabriken was to simply provide a space for the troops, where they could meet and socialize, talk, laugh, dance, chill, and even more, where they could be creative, express themselves, have a stage and think outside the box.

A very unusual approach for a military authority, but soon it turned out that the Ministry’s plan worked out just great and exceeded any expectations. The Furillenite troops were really enthusiastic about the new addition to their otherwise pretty boring routine. They started to engage and become active participants of “Bar Café Fabriken”. It seemed as if the bar was not only affecting their free time but also their working life. All of a sudden there was a feeling of teamwork, togetherness and a sense of responsibility among them like never before.

Meanwhile “Bar Cafe Fabriken” has become a synonym for “Grant space and freedom instead of confining rules”, and the Furillenite troops are a thriving community. Let’s keep this spirit up at Virtual Furillen!

So we had our evening of funk at Furillen. The playlist – put together in consultation with Micky and Vallys – was awesome, with almost five hours’ worth of classics, from Earth, Wind Fire’s September …

I particularly enjoyed hearing the responses of people who arrived on Saturday morning to find that the sim had received a radical makeover …

… and again on Sunday, after further changes were made overnight …

As with our Bowie weekend, the event was mainly about taking a deep dive into the music itself, rather than simply listening to a few big hits. So we had around 20 hours’ worth of music streaming through, including extended versions of all 8 studio albums, some early demo recordings, and plenty of live material, with some bootleg tapes thrown in for good measure.

As ever, Furillenites came into their own by taking some really great pictures. What I enjoy most about the design of the sim is that it has some very strong features – the slag heaps, the tree line, the pier, the airstream – that can be played around with in this way.

We even had a different ground texture on Sunday, just to push the surrealist look a bit further …

For anyone who missed the event, I’ll be keeping the sim in Radiohead mode for a day longer, so do log on and visit – it won’t look like this ever again! There is some Radiohead-inspired art on display – a couple of installations and a slideshow of great pictures – which is well worth a look.

As always, such events are characterized by conviviality as much as anything else, and we’ll certainly be holding more in future. Watch out here and in the inworld group announcements for details soon.

First: The rain went away, returned and went away again – and you can expect more ‘intermittent showers’ this week. I enjoy having changeable weather on the sim, and will work on more variations during the coming weeks.

Second: We have a competition winner – an album of photographs put together by Cindering Blocks. As I explained in the IM sent around to the group inworld, although this was a very strong field, three of the four judges had this album in 1st or joint 1st place, so it is a decisive winner. We admired the quality of the photographs in their own right, as well as the thematic coherence of the album as a whole.

I found all eleven entries very strong, and will be publishing each one as a blog post – at a rate of two per day – for the remainder of this week. Please note that the order they are being published in is simply the order in which they appear in the competition Flickr stream. We didn’t rank the other entries, and none is implied by this ordering. So …

I have already settled on a format for the next round, and will be announcing this later on. As I said in another post, while competitions are not for everyone, they provide a focus and challenge that some people enjoy – and there are plenty of other ways to be creative at Furillen.

So let’s not get too precious with ourselves …

Third: We had our Abba event. We yelped to Dancing Queen, sobbed (with Micky) to SOS, and enjoyed some of the more obscure ‘B-sides’ in Abba’s back catalogue (although Mamma Mia has rendered many of these a lot less obscure).

As for the event itself, the sim was full the whole time and several people couldn’t get in at all. And the costumes? These pictures surely speak for themselves.